Features
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‘Time a river we swim in freestyle’: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry & prose
Katie Da Cunha Lewin Throughout Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art, his manifesto on poetry written in aphorisms published in 2007, he returns to central questions about […]
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Essential fragments: on the poetry of David Harsent
Below is an essay by Lavinia Singer from A Working Model of the Fall from Grace: Essays & Poems for David Harsent, recently published by Offord Road Books in […]
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Try To Be Better: an engagement with the creative practice of W. S. Graham
This week sees the launch of Try To Be Better, a multi-disciplinary engagement with the idiosyncratic creative practice of the late poet W. S. Graham, co-edited by Sam Buchan-Watts […]
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Marratide: William Martin’s Chorography of County Durham
‘Cuthbert’s brief dream / And high resting place / Here before Durham’ (s.16): Warden Law by William Martin, part of ‘Wiramutha Helix’ Jake Morris-Campbell Next year […]
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‘The Poet As Witness’: CD Wright & The Art of Curating the Past
Paul Stephenson How do we look at a difficult past? Carolyn Forché has put forward the notion of ‘poetry of witness’ for a category of poems that ‘bear […]
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Making the Cut: John Greening on editing poems
John Greening I often quote Basil Bunting’s advice to young poets, that you should ‘cut out every word you dare’. Bunting certainly practised what he preached in his […]
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Private Morgan: World War Two & Edwin Morgan’s ‘The New Divan’
© Jessie Ann Matthew, National Galleries Scotland Richie McCaffery While many of Edwin Morgan’s (1920-2010) Scottish near contemporaries in poetry, such as Hamish Henderson and Sorley MacLean, wrote […]
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The Anatomy of Movement: On Georg Trakl’s Poetry
Georg Trakl at Venice lido, 1913 Will Stone I In this essay I have attempted to illuminate what for want of a better phrase one might […]
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‘St Ives Allure’: WS Graham among the artists
Monday 19th November is the late poet WS Graham’s 100th birthday. Below are extracts from David Whittaker’s new book St Ives Allure, a generously-illustrated story of the painters, sculptors […]
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Writing Birth: on the poetry of motherhood
Rachel Bower In her 1995 work Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Carcanet), Eavan Boland described a powerful dilemma at the […]
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Permanent Afternoons: The Underworld in the Poetry of Sean O’Brien
John Challis Then, midway down that channel of the dead, A figure thick with mud rose up and called: ‘Who are you? You have come before your time.’ […]
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Breaking the Unthinkable Silence: on Michael Hofmann’s ‘One Lark, One Horse’
(photograph by Jemimah Kuhfeld: www.jemimahkuhfeld.co.uk) André Naffis-Sahely Poetry critics, just like the rest of us, are largely ungenerous to the middle-aged. More often than not, we expect our […]
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The World of the Half-Seen: on Ruth Padel’s ‘Emerald’ and writing loss
Nadia Saward Emerald, Ruth Padel’s new collection (Chatto & Windus, 2018), is primarily an elegy for her mother who passed away in 2017 at the age of ninety-seven. […]
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‘Abducted’: on a poem by Stanley Kunitz
(photograph by Lynn Saville: www.lynnsaville.com) Martina Evans Although I know the month and the day, I don’t know the year I discovered Stanley Kunitz’s poem ‘The Abduction’. His […]
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Hart Crane in Greenwich Village
(photograph by Walker Evans) Francesca Bratton In his 1921 flâneur’s guide to New York City, Hints to Pilgrims, the dramatist and essayist Charles S. Brooks briefly interrupts his […]
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‘Translation is the Opposite of War’: On Sarah Maguire
Photos above & below: © Crispin Hughes André Naffis-Sahely True translators take to their craft so intensely that they tend to hurtle towards invisibility, and in Britain, the […]
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‘Back into the socket’: William Fuller’s Playtime
Photo credit: Anna Fuller They are tempted to note patterns in the scene below, but its aspects are so various and the names to be applied to them so […]
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Meeting Point: on being a Chinese poet writing in English
Mary Jean Chan ‘I realize that the Other doesn’t really look for diversity – he is only looking for himself’ – Kei Miller As a Chinese poet now […]
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‘Very gently struck / the quay night bell’: W.S. Graham & The Nightfishing
2018 will mark the centenary of the poet W.S. Graham (1918-1986). Graham – a Scot who for most of his adult life lived in west Cornwall – was neglected in […]
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Judith or Salomé? Ambiguity & inequality in the poetry of Frederick Seidel
Matthew Halliday It is not always easy to distinguish between Judith and Salomé in the Western art tradition. Are we viewing Judith’s faithfulness to God in a state of […]